


Aqua Vitae

by Donna_Immaculata, ElDiablito_SF



Series: The Fabulous Adventures in Immortality of the Vampire Aramis and the Man Who Named the Mountain, Volume I [2]
Category: DUMAS Alexandre - Works, Les Trois Mousquetaires | The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Genre: Alternate Universe - Greek Mythology, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Blasphemy, Explicit Sexual Content, First Time, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-30
Updated: 2015-05-30
Packaged: 2018-04-02 01:59:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4041358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Donna_Immaculata/pseuds/Donna_Immaculata, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElDiablito_SF/pseuds/ElDiablito_SF
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>These awkward early days of courtship require a seascape and a monastic retreat.  The doing or undoing is sure to follow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Aqua Vitae

**Author's Note:**

> 'Tis the sequel no one asked for, which is the very definition of literary onanism. Nevertheless, we do hope you enjoy it (we certainly pleased ourselves while writing it).
> 
> We'd also like to thank Caspar David Friedrich for [this](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4b/Sunset_by_Caspar_David_Friedrich.jpg) illustration.

**Varna, Bulgaria - 1394**

I watched him upon the shores of the Black Sea as the Aurora colored the sky with hues of lavender and pink. He was wrapped in his cloak but his feet were bare and wading in the foamy waters. He hadn’t slept because he doesn’t need to sleep, and I, freshly risen from my own slumber, warmed by the ghosts of faded dreams, tried in vain to read his thoughts by the barely perceptible creases on his flawless skin. He wasn’t thinking of Phoebus upon his chariot, that much I knew for certain. He lifted his hands, stricken by their own pallor, and I saw the phantom claws of fear closing around his heart.

“Come,” I said, “You should feed,” and stretched out my hand to him.

***

I have been alone for so long that I have forgotten what it was like to have a companion at my side that I am expected to converse with. There was so much I wanted to say to him that the very thought of it crushed my tongue beneath its anvil weight and, for a while, all I could do was look. I wondered whether I would ever look my fill.

Aramis - what a beautiful name. So befitting, that in all my ruminations upon him I could not have come up with a better moniker.

We left Snagov that very night and rode east because I had the sudden need to see the sea. It wouldn’t be the Aegean, but in a pinch it would have to do. The Eúxeinos Póntos, “hospitable sea,” let no man say my people were without a certain sense of sarcasm. Nobody knows why they called it the Black Sea, but I think we can all agree that it wasn’t due to its friendly waters.

My Hyacinthus flew at my side upon his steed, Grigoriy following as close behind as was respectable, while we fled as if pursued by the Furies themselves. If one or both of us was mad, I knew not; which one of us then was Orestes and which Pylades, had not mattered at all since both have spilled blood and neither’s hands were clean.

We broke camp only because Grigoriy was about to drop dead and I couldn’t afford to lose my trusted minion during a time of such transition. Aramis wouldn’t sit still, his hands, like two white moths, flitting to his hair, to his sabre, inside his cloak like back to their cocoon. I thought upon our first meeting, that sense that I had been trying to grasp a fluttering bat with my hands.

“My little flittermouse,” I said, placing my hand upon his shoulder to bind him to this earth for the time being. “Why so restless?”

For a moment, I thought he might strike me, but then he turned his face towards my hand, where it rested upon his cloak, and pressed his lips against the pulse of my wrist.

“Oh,” I said, again feeling inadequate to express the emotion that suddenly swelled up inside me. That he wanted to drink from me, in itself, I accepted as axiom. That he still felt that he needed my permission, made my head spin. I turned my wrist to make my intention more clear and spoke the same words I spoke to him the night he came to me in my tent, “Do it.”

“I have not fed since..,” he lifted his eyes towards me and I read fear in them again. “I may not be able to control myself.”

“Aramis, drink,” I stated in a tone that normally broached no argument, but my fledgling chyortik still seemed unimpressed. So I used my other hand to reach for my dagger and slice open my wrist. My blood fell to the ground between us tearing a cry of wrathful indignation from him as he finally alighted upon my skin and I felt his fangs and tongue lash out against the outpouring of my lifeforce.

***

It was Aramis’ idea that we go to Varna to seek out whatever scripture was left from the days of the Preslav Literary School, in the hope that the earliest Cyrillic inscriptions ever preserved might shed some light upon his powers and origins.

He’s very erudite, my Hyacinthus. Incidentally, to this day he truly despises that name, reminding me ceaselessly of how tragically the story of Hyacinthus ended. I disagree - there is nothing tragic about a mortal loved so fiercely by two gods that he was destroyed by it. In the spring, when the hyacinth blossoms, I shall dig up a bulb and present it to him. Our congress is still best when he’s in the throes of rage.

He kept a journal, which I was amused to discover had been entirely in Latin. How very monastic of him. Predictably, he was a bit scandalized when I told him about my own dabbling into the monastic lifestyle, and the true reason I had resorted to it. Apparently, using a monastery as my own personal harem wasn’t to his liking. These new Slavic demons and their moral peculiarities!

At times, I watched by the molten tallow of a dying candle as he scribbled in his notes, seeking in the recesses of his memory the proper conjugation of an obscure Latin verb, until one night I took pity and provided the word to him myself.

“Why do you know this?” he groused, eyebrows furrowing.

“Because I am three thousand years old, flittermouse.”

“Yes, but you’re _Greek_.”

“True, but I had to learn Latin quite well in order to pal about with Hadrian.” I didn’t like to brag about such things, but Hadrian and I, well, we had a kinship. He would have made an excellent Achaean.

“You knew the Emperor Hadrian?” We were going to have to work on our trust, I saw, for he was still doubting me.

“Quite well. In fact, it was I who introduced him to Antinous.”

“One would have thought you would have kept Antinous all to yourself,” the chyortik smirked.

“Indeed, it’s a good thing I did not, considering how history unfolded itself. He was beautiful, but look to what end it had brought Hadrian?”

“To a magnificent villa in Tivoli?”

The Greek goddess of Discord may have been the beginning of my downfall, but the Wallachian chyortik would surely be the final death of me.

“I mean the mourning and the madness. _War_ , Aramis, destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the needless diaspora of the Judeans.”

“He deified Antinous,” my demonic lover shrugged. “It was quite forward thinking of him for he couldn’t have been certain of his own Apotheosis. He wasn’t even succeeded by a blood relative!” For some reason I could not yet discern, he was reacting rather poorly to this centuries old love story. “And I suppose, you believe they’re together on Olympus now,” he stated, dismissively.

“It isn’t a question of faith or debate, my Hyacinthus. They are together on Olympus now.”

I have not been to Olympus in some time, in truth, I could not be sure that a certain Greco-Roman _Divus_ had indeed ascended to such heights, though I would have gladly personally conducted Antinous there by hand. Still, even the most preserved face of antiquity had nothing on the living Aramis.

“I hate speaking with you,” he declared and rose from his recumbent position.

And yet, how I loved teasing him, stoking the fire of that incandescent intellect. His cloak slid from his shoulder exposing his collarbones and he took a step towards me. I could almost make out the licks of wrath’s flame right under his skin.

“Besides, the Roman _divi_ don’t even live on Olympus!” His entire body palpitated with petulance.

“Would it please you more,” I asked, “to think of their souls in Hell, my young priestling? They would have deserved it by the double, being both pagan and androphilic.”

I watched him clench and unclench his fists. I pictured him slamming me against the wall of our shared room, sinking his teeth into the flesh of my neck in the way that he had not done since our first meeting. I wanted to feel his hands on me as if my very existence depended on it. He had bitten his lips crimson and I had wished that it had been my own doing. He had tasted of ambrosia once, and I had a mighty thirst.

“No, it would not please me,” he finally replied with a soft exhale, and walked past me out of the room.

***

For as long as I can remember, I had always longed to discover the path to Paradise. Ever since my early boyhood, the tale of Adam and Eve living their days without toil, surrounded by the most beautiful flowers, serenaded by birdsong, feasting on succulent fruit and ruling over the beasts of the forest had spoken to me in a way that I never quite understood. All that I knew was that once I was grown I would set off in search of the Garden of Eden. I would battle the Cherub that stood at its gates, guarding them with its sword, and I would be victorious. Childish fancies, one might think. (And _he_ would certainly think so, my beauteous Adonis, whose true nature I had sensed even before he told me about his divine provenance. I could picture his lips, so finely shaped, curl in a mocking smile were I to share with him the dreams I had spun in my boyhood.) Childish fancies they might have been, and yet the tales had not been devised by children. They had sprung from the minds of wise men, the elders of their tribe, and they had been designed to capture the imagination of the deprived, to render their lives in this vale of tears bearable.

This is not what I had known then. I had not yet eaten from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. I devoured the stories told me by my elders. I had faith in them.

As Aurora’s last blush faded in the western sky, I waded through the waters of the Black Sea and pondered how I had found Paradise at last. He was there with me, the lover of whom I had dreamed without cease for eight days. The Platonic ideal, who had been creeping into my dreams since the long-gone days when boyhood faded into adolescence, had become flesh and made his dwelling amongst us.

He watched me with eyes like cinders. I had seen desire kindle the eyes of men as well as women, but I’d never before seen such fire. It would devour me. _He_ would devour me the moment I let him.

When I had first sought him not a fortnight ago, dragged towards him by a force that was beyond my control, I had not feared death. Death by his hand, I knew, would have been bliss. He would have opened the gates to Eden for me and I would have entered Paradise.

What had changed? I glanced at him from underneath my hood. Not that it hid anything. He knew when I looked at him, he cherished every glance. Every touch. Every bite. My body shuddered and my skin tautened at the memory of the divine – never had a description been more apt – flavour that had filled my mouth and my senses when I lifted his wrist to my mouth and feasted on the potion brewed by celestial spirits.

He had opened the gates to Paradise for me, and I had eaten from the Tree of Knowledge. The fruit had been sweeter than anything I’d ever tasted. It had left me with a hunger that could never be stilled with anything but the essence of him. He knew that, and he was waiting for me to come and ask for more; to _demand_ more, because he did not want me to come to him as a supplicant.

“We should go back,” I said, pulling my cloak closer around myself. I was shivering, I knew not why. He nodded without a word and reached out a hand. It was unconsciously done, a gesture that appeared to come naturally to him, and I bristled. What was I supposed to do with it? Did he wish to conduct me like he would conduct a lady? Was that the role he had assigned to me when he asked me to come with him? Was I to be relegated to play the part of Hyacinthus, forever destined to dread the jealous ire of Zephyrus?

If what he had told me about his parentage was true (and in my heart of hearts I did not doubt it), he came from a wrathful stock. Yet so did I. My line was a noble one, and my blood was as hot as that of my ancestors who had fought and won many battles in these lands. I had been a scholar and a warrior. For over a century, I had learned how to become what I am; I had refined my skills and honed my faculties. My Greek companion appeared to believe that he alone could infuse me with what his brethren called _arete_. Despite his three thousand years, he had not realised that the Hellenic _paideia_ had been replaced by Christian virtues. In this world, he was the barbarian, he was the heathen (and oh! how I could taste the pagan tang in his blood!), yet he refused to accept the new order and carried himself with an arrogance that did not befit the defeated.

It had been easy to gain access to the monastery in Varna. I wore my habit with an elegance and ease that proclaimed me to be a man of the cloth, and my companion was no less at home in a cloister than me. The scriptorium was at our disposal, as was the bathhouse. As was a cell.

I had not slept on the journey hither. His blood had been sustenance enough, I craved neither food nor sleep. I rested by his side as he slept – swept up in Hypnos’ arms as he would no doubt say, with that small mocking smile that made me grit my teeth and bare my fangs at him, which only appeared to amuse him more. On the second night, I began to envision tearing open his throat and gorging on his blood until I devoured the very last drop. The night after that, I moved from his throat to his thigh. The surge of blood was powerful there. It cascaded from his veins into my mouth, and my body responded with an all-consuming wave of arousal. I could not suppress the groan that rose from deep within my chest and spilled from my lips before I could swallow it.

Even in his sleep, he had sensed my distress, just like he sensed all my moods. Of what did a demigod dream? I did not know, and I had not yet asked. His dreams must have been agreeable that night, because he reached for me, rolled on his side, gathered me up in his arms and pressed the evidence of Morpheus’ generous gifts into my loins. Hovering in the world between waking and dreaming, he held me against him, and his hand moved swiftly towards my groin.

“You want me, little chyortik, do you not?” he murmured into my hair. And for the first time, I realised that it was a question. That he was not just teasing me: that he was as uncertain about me as I was about him.

His other arm lay trapped half between us, half beneath me, and I tugged it free and carried his hand to my lips. “Call me by my name,” I told him, dragging my teeth over the pads of his fingers. I felt him smile.

“Aramis,” he breathed, palming me through the cloth. “Such a beautiful name,” he continued, and his hand suddenly acquired a serpentine quality as it snaked under my clothes, and his fist swallowed my cock. “I could think of no better.”

‘Good thing you didn’t name me,’ I wanted to say, but I bit my tongue and tilted my head back until it rested against his shoulder. He was broader than me and his body enveloped mine, and the tenderness and reverence of his touch would have made me weep, had I ever cried.

He let go of me but briefly, only to free himself from his breeches, and he rocked into me, pushing his cock between my thighs like he had done that night on the battlefield. But his thrusts were slow and deep this time, the rhythm of his hips deliberate, unstoppable. It brought to mind waves crashing into shore. The sea was in his blood, but rather than drowning me in the surf, it cradled me gently in undulating waves and kept me afloat. I spent myself first, with his fingers in my mouth and his lips on my neck. He held me as I shuddered and gasped, and then he pulled back and slammed into me, holding fast to my hip, and he spilled himself in a salty gush, like a wave breaking against rocks. I pressed my teeth into his fingers, hard enough to hurt, not hard enough to puncture skin, and sucked in his digits, teasing the tips with my tongue. My reward was a strangled laugh and the sound of my name, spoken in a voice I barely recognised as his. “Aramis.” A kiss that scorched the skin of my neck. “Aramis.”

***

Balancing in time and space between Rome and Byzantium, Varna had seen the rise and fall of great empires. The monastic scriptorium held many secrets, even though my Hellenic idol claimed that nothing would ever compare to the splendour of the library in Alexandria. I knew him well enough by now to realise that he was teasing me. He delighted in kindling my anger, like a man playing with a kitten delights in its attempts at swatting him and laughs at the marks its claws leave on his skin. It was most peculiar. My teeth had driven into his jugular vein, and yet he still fancied himself invulnerable.

Perhaps he was. Perhaps it was I who was wrong. I watched him remove his clothes in the monastic bathhouse that had been put at our disposal during our stay. The monks honoured the old tradition of Constantinople to give their guests not only bread, wine, meat, fish and fruit, but also the opportunity to bathe as often as they wished. His body was that of a Grecian statue, the images I had conjured up in my waking dreams had not lied. Even without touching him, I could feel the strength that lay coiled in the muscles of his arms, his torso, his legs. He’d had three thousand years to hone his body to perfection and he was gifting it to me, trusting me that I would do it no damage.

He sank into the water and smiled at me. I could tell from the slant of his shoulders (for even the smallest tension is obvious to the predator’s eye) what it cost him to not reach out for me. He wanted me to come to him, like a feral beast that he wished to tame. Was he the predator and I the prey? I could not tell. For over a century, the men with whom I’d had congress had not been my equals. Any man who hunted me was my enemy and I had to dispose of him. This one was hunter and friend at once.

As I undressed, I positioned myself so that he had to turn his head if he wanted to watch me. Again I saw the tension in the lines of his body as he struggled for control. The power I had over him was as great as the power he had over me. When I lowered myself into the water, it was without touching him. I could smell his arousal even over the scent of the soap and the fragrant oils that misted around us. The beat of his blood sent pulse waves through the water that lapped at me like Pentecostal tongues of fire. His hair curled in damp locks around his face, clung to his neck and his shoulders and with his noble profile and steam rising around him like a halo, he resembled nothing more than the icon of a Saint. Like our Lord Jesus, he was both God and man. The water of the bath was like the waters of the River Jordan, and I suddenly understood that the hour of baptism had come. This was the moment in which our future fates would be decided: salvation or damnation. I stretched out a hand and touched the tips of my fingers to his forehead as if in a blessing. He smiled, a sad, ancient smile, and I sensed the weight of centuries that rested upon his shoulders.

When I glided towards him through the water, silent like the death that I’d so often brought, his body arched up to meet mine: an unspoken vow, more solemn for its silence than if it had been made with words. His hands on my hips as I straddled him, my lips pressed to his forehead in an ancient benediction.

Beneath me, he was so hard I could have taken him for a marble sculpture, had it not been for the heat that rose from within his veins, evaporated through his skin and called out to me. He kissed me at last, or perhaps I kissed him first: he opened his mouth for me and I bit his lip to force a groan out of him, my hand wrapped around his throat.

“You’ll be the death of me,” he gasped, his eyes black and unfocused with lust when we broke the kiss and were staring at each other in wonderment. His hand moved between both our bodies, dictating the rhythm of my hips as I fucked myself into his fist. He twisted his wrist and pressed his cock against mine, and my hips jerked forward in a desperate jolt.

“I’ve warned you,” I growled against his lips. “It’s too late now.”

At that, he snarled and, with a thrust of his hips meant to unseat me, forced me to cling to him with both arms. My nails dug into the side of his neck and his blood welled up. I could feel it beneath my fingertips, almost but not quite touching it, and I clenched my hands around his throat to quicken its pulse.

His hand lay like a vice around my hip, the experienced hand of a master horseman guiding his steed through its paces. His other hand – oh! its pressure was exquisite. Firm and tender, the confident, smooth grip of a man who had undone countless lovers. He was determined to undo me then and there, without paying his own arousal any heed.

I dragged my nails down his chest, past his hand, and I wrapped my fingers around his cock. He startled, and I realised that I had not yet touched him like that. Twice had we lain together, and he’d never yet spent himself in my hand. His cock twitched in my grip, and pleasure surged through me and burst in my groin. My body slipped out of my control, but he was holding me, reining in the frantic thrusts of my hips, and he was speaking words in my ear that I didn’t understand. I spilled myself in his hand with a harsh sob, and my teeth hadn’t even breached his skin. He waited, his whole body quivering like a hound straining on its handler’s leash, for my shudders to subside, holding me against his chest. He then touched his fingers to my wrist. “Aramis,” he whispered. “Please.”

I lay against him, one leg between his, straddling his thigh, and I was kissing him, deeply, with lips and tongue, as I slid my hand around his cock. My head spun from my own climax, from the heat, from the vapours that swirled around us; from his arousal that vibrated through his skin and into mine. His crisis nigh, he bucked under me, gasped, the muscles and tendons in his neck tautened and his head snapped back. His lip snagged on my teeth and a droplet of blood trickled onto my tongue. I swooped down on him with a hiss and sucked his lip into my mouth, and his cock swelled in my hand, spurting his essence over us both.

I lay spread-eagled on the floor. My lover was on his side, one arm curled around my middle, his mouth hot against my shoulder. As I turned my head, my gaze fell on the image of Cyril and Methodius on the wall, the Saints who had brought Christianity to the pagan Slavs, and my stomach shuddered in breathless, silent laughter.

That roused him from his stupor. His hair trailed over my skin as he raised his head, and he looked around like a man waking from deep slumber. “We should go,” he said and smiled at me. “Can you walk, little incubus, or do you need me to carry you?”

I grabbed a fistful of his hair, tugged him down and bit his swollen mouth. “Are you sure you can get up again, old man?”

He laughed – a low, delighted laugh, such as I had not heard from him yet. “Let me get you back to our cell, and I’ll show you.”

***

Lying beneath him on the hard straw mattress, I was at last willing to believe that his body had been shaped by divine hands. His built wasn’t Herculean, but it was as if every line, every curve had been calculated by Euclid himself to come together in perfect harmony. He was kissing me with his fingers tangled in my hair, and I pressed the flat of my palm to the side of his neck, where faint scars marred the white skin. Not for the first time did it strike me how seamlessly his hips slotted between my wide-spread thighs. One long hand was roaming my flank, fingers dipping into my armpit, scuttling over the inside of my arm, rubbing circles into the arch of my ribs. His hand wanted to be everywhere at once, I knew that, because it mirrored my own desire. Ensconced by his body, I was drowning in the heartbeat that reverberated around me and against me: beneath my lips, beneath my hand, against my chest. Against my cock. My desire for him was so great I didn’t even want to feed. I wanted to relish the taste of his mouth, the feel of his skin, the shove and slide of his hardness against mine, without the distraction of his blood in my mouth.

As if he had sensed where my thoughts had turned, he pressed an open-mouthed kiss to my lips and then his hot breath trailed over my cheekbone, scalded my temple and brushed against my hair. I felt his blood boil in his vein as he turned his neck, proffering it to me. “Take it,” he whispered. “It’s yours.” He swallowed, I felt his throat clench, and then his voice again, soft enough to have been nothing but a mirage. “I’m yours.”

The whimper that escaped my tortured lips appeared to delight him. The hand in my hair tightened as he pulled my head closer. His other hand slithered beneath my back and I arched into him, into the moist heat that had gathered between our bodies. Has he come upon me like the Son of Man had come upon the Earth granting eternal life to those who drank his blood? Was he to be my saviour, this Son of God, whose divine aspect I could not doubt even when he lay atop me, panting, writhing and dripping sweat like a common soldier or knightling?

I forced my eyes open and tore my mouth away from where it had been clamped to that vessel that contained the miracle potion. “No,” I whispered through clenched teeth.

A shock jolted through him. He raised himself off me and, as I didn’t look at him, gently cupped my face and turned it towards him. “What is it, my li-” he bit his lip. “What is it, Aramis? Do you not desire it?” He hesitated and added, barely more than a breath. “Me?”

That he should still be uncertain of my desire for him, even as I lay beneath him with my legs spread like a whore and my cock so hot and hard that it was all but leaving an imprint on his stomach, made me laugh. His eyes grew murky and his heart fluttered in his chest like a bird trapped between one’s hands. “No!” I grew serious again. I raised my head and pressed my lips to his in a chaste kiss. “It’s not that,” I said, falling back into the pillow. “It’s-” How could I explain the sensation of liquid light exploding in my mouth and flooding my senses? But that look in his eyes, the shiver under his skin – I could not bear it. “When I drink from you,” I said. “That is all there is. Everything else… this,” I ran my hand down his arm and pushed it between us. “I don’t feel this,” I whispered, pressing my cock to his.

His brow furrowed and he lowered his head, nestling his forehead against my shoulder. “What if I took you?” His hand travelled up and down my body, striving to touch me everywhere at once. “Would you feel that?”

Had he been any other man, his blood would have been forfeit. Men had gone down on their knees for me, yet not one had ever dared ask the same of me. He truly was invincible, my Adonis incarnate, boldly claiming me as his.

His words gave me pause. My demonic soul craved his blood. My human soul longed for his touch. Could I have both?

And so it came to pass that I found myself spread out on my back with a pillow cushioning my loins. He had fetched an alabaster jar with tallow from his trunk – his hand rested on my stomach even as he moved away from me to reach across the room – and was now kneeling between my legs. I was loath to admit, even to myself, that he had been right: there was a lot he could teach me. I had never known that it was possible for men to sodomise each other face to face.

He had stopped me when I attempted to roll over on my stomach. “Like this,” he had said with a fond smile that lit up his dark eyes. “You can drink from my neck like this.”

The skin of his lips was thin and tender when he leaned in and kissed me, I could have broken it easily. He knew that, for he teased me gently by pushing his lip past mine and between my teeth. It was to distract me, perhaps, for his hand was moving between my legs and he could feel the tremors running through my thighs. Never in my life had I felt so exposed and vulnerable, not even on that day when I lay in my own blood and the man who had killed me towered above me, laughing at my departing life.

Athos wasn’t laughing. Athos. I had not called him by his name yet. Was it because of his supercilious smirk when he had told me how first a mountain and then an entire peninsula had been named after him? Or was it the fear of taking the name of the Lord in vain?

His mouth was solemn against mine, and he kissed me as if he was drinking from the fountain of youth: ravenous, yet reverent. Quite suddenly, a sharp sting: his teeth at my lip. As I gasped in surprise, his tallow-slick finger slipped into me. For a heartbeat or two I stared at him, wide-eyed, until he lowered his head again and nipped at the ridge of my jaw. “Stop me if it gets uncomfortable,” he said in one breath very close to my ear. In lieu of an answer, I arched my spine and his finger slid in more deeply.

“You _are_ an incubus,” he gasped against my clavicle. His arm was trembling, I could feel minute tremors flitter beneath his skin. His cock burned itself into my flesh like a branding iron as he stretched out by my side, one hand in my hair, the other rocking gently between my legs. His lips ghosted over my skin, raising gooseflesh in their wake, even though I was burning up. And then he did something that made my whole body come off the bed and I swore in my native language. “You like this,” he breathed in my ear, and I could feel him smile. He moved his finger again, but I was prepared this time and pushed down on his hand, eliciting a filthy moan from his throat.

I was no novice in carnal matters: after decades of debauchery, I knew how to give pleasure and how to take it. But this was new, this sensation of liquid lust simmering in my very core and spilling over, all the way to the tips of my fingers and toes. He moved his hand again, angling his wrist, and he cupped me. He held me in the palm of his hand and I let myself sink into his grip. There was something very liberating about giving myself over to another man like that, and I pulled in my knee to spread my legs further apart and pushed down onto his hand. He hissed and pulled back, and for a moment I thought I had hurt him, but the look in his eyes, the blurry, unfocused expression of a man in the throes of fever, told me otherwise. His hand disappeared and reappeared again and, crouching above me, he _shoved_ tallow into me. His fingers followed, and he was panting above me, his lips parted, and the throb of his pulse at the base of his neck was so that I expected it to rip apart his skin and spill out in a gush of blood.

“Come here.” I put my hand on the nape of his neck and pulled him down. His skin was damp with perspiration and salty-sweet as I licked the curve of his throat with the flat of my tongue. So much _life_ ran through him, such potency; his divine essence trapped in the feeble container of a human body. I nipped at the pulse point, gently, without damaging it. Yet. I don’t know which god or demon had granted me such control, but it was easy to rein in my thirst in the knowledge that it would be quenched soon.

He pulled his knees in so that my legs came to rest on his and raised himself off me. Then, his hands were everywhere at once: on me, on him, between my legs, he was spreading me apart and my head rolled back.

“Fuck!”

His cock slipped into me. So much thicker than his fingers, so infinitely more overwhelming. “ _Fuck._ ”

When I forced my eyes open to look at him, his head was bent and he watched where he was screwing himself slowly into me. His hair stuck to his face and neck and his lowered lashes threw long shadows on his cheeks. Every muscle in his torso and neck was taut like the chord of a Byzantine lyra. He looked up at me and we both shuddered, his hips snapped forward and all air left my lungs in a soundless gasp. He collapsed on top of me, bracing himself on one arm. “Can you feel that?” he whispered hoarsely into my mouth with a shallow thrust of his hips.

I bit his lip and his tormented skin yielded. It burst under the merest pressure of my teeth and I swallowed the droplets of blood greedily. “Can you still feel it?” He had begun to fuck me, slow and steady and so deep that each sway of his hips forced a groan out of me.

I seized him around the waist and used him for leverage to slant my pelvis. The angle changed and lust exploded in my groin and blackened my vision. “Like. That,” I panted, clawing blindly at his arm, yanking him down and sinking my teeth into his neck. His body convulsed atop me and he thrust in hard, driving me into the headboard.

One hand alighted on the top of my head, and he hitched up my leg with the other, “What do you feel?” His voice was a feral growl, such as rises in the depth of the Carpathian forests in the dead of winter. His blood rushed into my mouth, stained my cheeks, ran into my hair, stuck his chest to mine. “Everything,” I choked around a mouthful of his essence. “Everything. Athos.” My teeth tore in more deeply, and my body clamped down on his cock. I opened my eyes and looked straight at the cross on the wall. My mouth brimming over with his lifeforce, my body devouring his flesh and blood, I was immolated in the fires of Hell.

***

Heaven. Wait. No. Whatever the monotheists call their Heaven. _This_.

He had said my name, said it as if it were a blessing or a curse, and I felt tears burst from my eyes and mingle with my blood, and then he drank them down, too.

He had... He was... No.

I was…

So many years. After Hera’s curse had robbed me of a woman’s touch, I had laughed at the Goddess of the Hearth and I had taken man after man to prove her curse useless. But even in the most orgiastic throes of debauchery, I have ever been alone. In my soul, in my heart - alone. In my bed, they may have been numerous but they did not touch me. _Noli me tangere_ , words attributed to Aramis’ beloved Christ, but spoken first by me. Only in Greek: Μή μου ἅπτου. Do not cling to me. Do not have need of me. I do not belong to you.

To him. I have only ever belonged to him. But I had to wait three thousand years to learn it.

“Aramis.” One hand clinging to the base of his skull to hold his teeth yet closer to my neck, the other grasping his leaking prick, trapped in the searing heat between our bodies as I drove into him. “Aramis!”

I was drunk on his very intoxication. With his eyes shut and his nails digging into my shoulder blades as surely as his teeth sank into the veins in my neck, he was helpless to stop himself, but I didn’t want him to. I was inside him and he had granted me passage there. Into that Heaven, that Elysium.

I could feel my body weakening, losing touch with reality with each thrust, my mind became so still that I could feel a darkness enveloping me just as I enveloped him. I wasn’t alone anymore, _he_ could touch me, could feel me, could fill the void inside me. I did not understand how we had come here so quickly, for only a few days back we barely dared look at each other, afraid to find in each other’s faces the rejection neither one of us could at present contemplate. But in that moment, I knew that I would gladly give the last drop of my blood for him, because he opened Heaven’s door for me, and I no longer had to face eternity alone.

“Athos,” he moaned again, hips thrusting up to meet my own as my hand stroked along his slick, heated flesh. And I, who had been waiting for what felt like forever to come inside him, could hold myself back no longer.

I pulled at his hair, separating his mouth from my jugular and pressed my lips to his, tasting my own blood, the metallic taste of it intermingled with the flavor that was so indelibly _his_ , and I licked deep into his throat, wanting to fuck all of him with every extension of my body. He moaned into my mouth and I drank his moans like the finest heather mead and swallowed the phantom echo of my own blood before my body exploded into a thousand scattered pieces.

When I had come to, he was still naked, his perspiration-soaked abdomen pressed into my side, his leg slung over one of mine, his almost feline head propped up by his arm as he balanced on the elbow. His eyes, also bright and catlike, were narrowed in concentration upon my face, and his finger drew gentle circles around my lips.

“Aramis,” I sighed. His name frozen like a benediction upon my lips.

“Did I break you, old man?”

His lips were smiling, but his eyes looked worried.

“It’ll take more than that to break me, sweet flittermouse.”

In truth, my entire body hummed with the mystical energy of rebirth. He had picked up my hand and pressed an open mouthed kiss to the center of my palm. I swallowed, unable to speak the words that came to me, clear as day. He smiled, hand brushing gently against my neck where I could feel the wounds he had inflicted already closing.

“Perhaps I should try harder then,” he stated.

“I’m up for a challenge if you are.”

He chuckled and I couldn’t help but laugh with him. And then I twisted upon the cot and started to slide down his body, my lips and tongue trailing along his sated and warm skin, memorizing the taste and feel of him, imprinting him upon my memory for all eternity.

***

The ironically called Hospitable Sea was murky again. No self-respecting sea gull would land upon a breaking wave’s crest. One didn’t have to be a seaman to see a storm was coming. A strong gust of wind picked up Aramis’ cloak and blew it so far out that I had caught it with my own hand as I approached him along the sand.

“Do you think you have everything you need?” I asked, wrapping my arms around him, while he looked out into the brew that Poseidon had begun to stir.

“I think I have everything there was to find,” he responded, allowing his head to fall backwards onto my shoulder. I pressed a soft kiss to one of the protruding tendons of his neck.

“I’m sorry there wasn’t more,” I said. It was true, I had regretted that the Cyrillic lore could offer us so little on the nature of the Revenants.

“It was always a long shot,” he simply replied.

Perhaps he was right. We hadn’t truly come to Varna to learn the secret of Aramis’ creation. We had come here only to discover each other, and in the mirrors of each other’s faces, to find ourselves.

“Where would you like to go next?” I whispered into his earlobe.

“I hear good things about Krakow,” he replied.

Another strong gust of wind blew and tangled our cloaks together in such a way that they had formed a joint cocoon around our bodies. We both laughed. I pressed my chest closer into his back and his hand reached backwards to find mine and entwine our fingers together.

“Let it be Krakow then,” I responded. And when the wind subsided and let our cloaks fall limply at our sides, he did not pull his hand away, and neither did I.


End file.
